On Wednesday, October 19th, Tesla held it's 'part two' of what is expected to be a three part unveiling for the Tesla 3 model that will begin shipping in 2017. Part one of course showed us the exterior of the company's low priced sedan and the second event saw CEO Elon Musk announce that all new Tesla vehicles, including the the new 3 plus the existing X and S series will now have the required sensors included for autonomous driving capability. While this ability will not be available yet and will require a future software upgrade it assures drivers that their cars will not become obsolete when such capability is available. It also gives another pretty attractive reason to purchase a Tesla over competing models.

As part of the announcement the company showed a video of a Tesla Model X driving itself around an urban environment including entry to a freeway, merging into traffic, exiting off the freeway and finding and self parking. Quite impressive. All of this is said to be done at safety levels that are greater than a human driver. The sensors that are included in all new vehicles are a very robust assortment including 8 surround cameras for 360 degree coverage, 12 updated ultrasonic sensors plus forward facing radar. In order to run all this hardware the company has developed a new super powerful dedicated onboard computer it calls Tesla Vision in order to make sense of all this incoming data. So what do you think about this announcement? Impressed? Does it make you more eager to purchase a Tesla 3? Let us know in the comments.